Stretchable, Flexible, Transparent Nanotube Speakers 76
An anonymous reader writes "Chinese researchers have realised that a sheet of nanotubes behaves like a speaker when you send an audio current through it. The technology opens the way for a range of new versatile speaker systems. A video shows the speakers in action — some are stretched, one has even been sewn into a flag."
Audio wallpaper? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder how long before this technology is affordable?
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only in china would this seem more exotic, like i don't already have enough noise pollution in the city and dumbass individuals on their cellphones yapping away. Now i need to have dumbass num 2 booming the latest britney pop crap from his jacket.
Rick Roll of Wallpaper (Score:1)
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Ooooh never gonna zip you up
Never gonna tie you down
Never gonna twist you round and half-Windsor you
Never gonna make you crease
Never gonna say drip-dry
Never gonna catch in your fly and hurt you!
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talking billboards? (Score:1)
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Natural progression (Score:1)
Oh fuck!!! (Score:1)
Amazing (Score:2)
This is going to revolutionise the telescreen. They can be made in china, then installed all over America, the UK and China.
Sound Quality/Better speakers (Score:3, Interesting)
In addition, if you click on that link, you will hear violins. However, those violins will not sound like real violins. There is a whole spectrum of musical interest that must be flattened out to get this in a speaker.
Now, however, carbon nanotubes might be the key to unlocking giant sound in your living room. Exciting times!
Wow, I haven't been this excited about new technology since I saw a lazerdisk. And that was just because it was big and shiny.
Re:Sound Quality/Better speakers (Score:4, Informative)
Sigh. It's great that you're excited and all, but just because there's a new technology for turning electrical input into mechanical work doesn't mean it is an advance in speakers. For example, piezoelectrics were touted as the be-all-end-all for speaker design when they came out. But, it turns out, they are rather bad at being designed into speakers, and even then, they aren't that accurate (although there are certainly exceptions).
The fundamental problem in speaker design is the inescapable mismatch of mechanical impedance between the relatively solid (ie, low mechanical impedance) speaker and the relatively non-solid (ie, high mechanical impedance) air. Using horn loading helps this a lot (the best speakers I've ever hear were horn loaded) as this serves as a mechanical transformer between the speaker and the room air. But what helps more than anything else for a given amount of engineering effort and cost is doing all of the bandpass filtering well before the final amplification stage and having exactly one acoustic driver per amplifier output stage. (If you don't already understand the reasons for this, just ask, I'd love to tell you about them!)
Now, will a curtain of this nanotube stuff work as a speaker? Sounds probable. Will it work well? I doubt it, since to accurately reproduce sound, the actuating mechanism (ie, the cone in a conventional speaker) needs to be as rigid as possible so that the acoustic wave it produces accurately corresponds to the electrical signal delivered to it. Internal distortions in the actuating surface (waves on the cone of a conventional speaker, or on the surface of this nanotube stuff) distorts the output. The larger the actuating surface, the more important its rigidity (read: it needs an extremely low internal mechanical impedance).
The ideal sound source for reproduction is a physical point, not a sheet. The reason speakers have physical extent, rather than being points, is the coupling issue touched upon above: they need to have extent that is comparable to the wavelength they are trying to reproduce in order to have sufficient coupling to the atmosphere -- unless an acoustic coupling mechanism is used, like a horn.
Re:Sound Quality/Better speakers (Score:4, Informative)
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While it doesn't necessarily mean it will make a good speaker (the sound on the video sounded pretty bad, but that could be because of the music chosen, the recording, or the video player), but according to the article the mechanism of sound production is not mechanical. Most of your points are quite true when you're actually vibrating a solid to produce the sound, but don't apply otherwise.
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Quite so,
With you 100% on the active xover thing.
In horn loaded systems, an actice xover, combined with a design that keeps the drivers in their pistonic motion range is excellent.
Many years ago I had the pleasure of using Martin audio horn loaded system and it was stunning. The spread was excellent. you could het he same tonal balnce in most of a room.
Just bi-amping a 2 way system brings ahuge improvement!
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Not to mention YouTube isn't exactly the paragon of high fidelity audio (or video). Plus most recordings take into account that you're unlikely to want a full orchestra playing in your living room, so they compress the loudness range so you can still hear everything and your neighbors don't have you arrested.
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If you pay attention, a lot of dynamic subtlety is lost in recording. Listen to the fourth movement of Beethoven's ninth, and listen to how the bass solo is almost completely impossible to hear, unless the volume is turned up. If it were live, you would be able to hear it still, although softly. And you would be able to hear the expression as th
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I was actually complaining about the lack of dynamic sensitivity.
What on Earth is 'dynamic sensitivity'? Sounds like a BS term to me.
If you pay attention, a lot of dynamic subtlety is lost in recording.
Again, a BS term. What you seem to be talking about regarding the bass solo is a poor mastering, i.e. a poor equalisation or a poor capture of the bass solo to begin with. Anything else you complain about can be blamed on a poor mastering. It has nothing to do with speakers, unless you have shitty ones.
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What you seem to be talking about regarding the bass solo is a poor mastering
I know what I'm talking about. I am not talking about a single bass solo, I am talking about more than 20 years of experience listening, experiencing, and playing classical music. I am talking from experience with hundreds of different speakers, mikes, and amplifiers, in and out of recording studios. I am not talking about just myself, I am talking about the shared experience of many technicians in the field.
Now look, I gave you an experiment you can use to begin to develop your own sound awareness, an
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Like I said I'm a software engineer. Only phenomenons that can be described mathematically interest me, I'll dismiss anything else as psychoperceptive bullshit. You can swear you can hear what you're talking about as hard as other audiophiles swear that putting an audio CD in the freezer gives the music a softer sound or that they can hear the difference with DVD audios, that's not going to convince me.
But if you can't explain what you're talking about any better and have to resort to boasting your credenti
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Like I said I'm a software engineer. Only phenomenons that can be described mathematically interest me, I'll dismiss anything else as psychoperceptive bullshit.
Do you believe in love? Have you heard of Godel? [wikipedia.org] There are things that are true that can't be proven, and things that don't necessarily fit in a mathematical format.
You can swear you can hear what you're talking about as hard as other audiophiles swear that putting an audio CD in the freezer gives the music a softer sound or that they can hear the difference with DVD audios, that's not going to convince me.
You don't have to take my word for it, you can hear it for yourself. Try it.
The thing you said about "conventional speakers [having] huge difficulty dealing with subtle differences in volume" is bs
What makes one instrument sound different than another? Why does a clarinet sound different than a coronet, even when playing the same note? It is because they play the overtones of the pitch come at different intensities in different instruments. Sure, if a coronet
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Like I said, psychoperceptive bullshit. "Listening to it" is not an answer, because you can hear whatever you want. That's why there's a difference between blind tests and what people claim for their own observations. And there's nothing about sound that isn't mathematical, invoking GÃdel is completely out of place.
What makes one instrument sound different than another?
Very generally and basically, harmonics, envelope, or when there is noise then frequency profile (or "colour") of the noise. Pretendi
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Like I said, psychoperceptive bullshit. "Listening to it" is not an answer, because you can hear whatever you want.
Any true scientist is not afraid of an experiment. Suit yourself.
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That is all very true! And yes, unfortunately in the real world speakers are hardly ever calibrated (that is their frequency response is compensated for so that it's flat) and even if they were their environment plays a big part, as well as where the listener is in that environment.
So basically it's not so much the speaker itself the problem, but calibrating it (and you'll have a hard time to find any automated process to do it) and using the calibration data. I looked into it a couple of years ago and impl
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Thin film speakers already exist, although the film is held between rigid electrodes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_speaker [wikipedia.org]
The low mass is an advantage for accurate sound reproduction, but these speakers are impractical in most cases. I expect the nanotube speaker will have similar characteristics.
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You misspelled "dynamic range compression" [wikipedia.org]. The CD format has >90dB of dynamic range - more than your ear can hear in most environments. And if everyone was listening to CDs in their own private listening room, and didn't knee-jerk judge louder music to be better than quieter music, then that's how music might still get produced today. But they're not - music is listened to by people like your coworker, trying to play it just loud enough so they can hear the song in
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There is a whole community of people, who tend to listen to classical music, that is EXTREMELY interested in precise musical reproduction. They know what an orchestra sounds like, and they know a CD doesn't reproduce it very well. They will get annoyed if the sound is bumped up just to sound louder.
Recorded violins just don't sound like real violins. There are a number of reasons for this, but I will give you the same experiment I gave
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That's a waveform problem, not a "subtle differences in volume" problem. Address the individual links in the chain until the quality problem is solved. It will probably be expensive.
And yes, of course I've attended live classical music.
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And yes, the speaker is just one link in the chain, but a very important one, and honestly, I am quite excited about the prospect of better speakers. If this works out, it will be, if you allow me the colloquial expression, awesome!
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$ cat vmlinux > /dev/dsp
and hear what Linux really sounds like :-)
(You probably know that /dev/audio by default puts audio through a really ugly mu-law decompressor that makes anything sound horrible, even proper Sun .au files.)
Audio debugging is a fine art and can be quite a rewarding experience (if your musical taste permits), in paricular for loop optimization, distinguishing freezes from loops and such.
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*Audio debugging: Sending specially crafted debug messages from your software into /dev/dsp. Sometimes more useful than wading through tons of debug messages, in particular when dealing with a large number of iterations or timing constraints.
*Alternative: video debugging: Sending debug output directly to the framebuffer or certain video registers.
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There is a whole community of people, who tend to listen to classical music, that is EXTREMELY interested in precise musical reproduction. They know what an orchestra sounds like, and they know a CD doesn't reproduce it very well. They will get annoyed if the sound is bumped up just to sound louder.
The problem with most of that type of person is that they refuse to participate in and/or accept the results of double-blind tests to see if they are perceiving something that's actually different or it's a psych
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The problem with most of that type of person is that they refuse to participate in and/or accept the results of double-blind tests to see if they are perceiving something that's actually different or it's a psychological effect.
Give me a break, who are you even talking about? I'm not talking about mythical 'audiophiles' who are 'experts' and hear things no one else can hear, I'm talking about real differences in sound, that anyone who cares about can hear. If you want to hear it, I gave you an experiment you can do yourself to develop that ability. I am not imagining this.
I have wondered the same thing about audio encoding, and I think the reason is because anyone who cares uses 24 bit encoding, and really 16 bit encoding is
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and really 16 bit encoding is nearly enough to represent the entire capability of any real-life speaker currently.
I think you are thinking of the Nyquist frequency, which is related to the sample rate and not the bit depth. Either way, you're right that 16-bit, 44KHz audio theoretically can represent anything that most speakers can reproduce, but I'm talking about something else.
The quality of the speaker doesn't have a whole lot to do with the quantization of the data encoding. Quieter audio (when recorded
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An extreme example would be a waveform recorded at such a low volume that the difference between the peak and trough is only one bit. When that digital data is converted back to analogue, the DAC is going to more or less smooth it out into a sine wave no matter what the original shape was.
Exactly. You said it much better than I have in this thread. But, the unfortunate thing is, even if the audio at that level weren't smoothed out to a sine wave by the DAC, the speaker would do the same thing at the physical level.
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This means that in the case of digital audio, half of the bits in each sample are allocated to the top decibel of loudness
Each additional bit adds 6.02dB of dynamic range (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio#Fixed_point).
That's 6dB for one bit, not 1dB for half of the bits.
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Sorry, maybe I worded my post badly - maybe I shouldn't have used the decibel unit? Or maybe the equations on Wikipedia give an "average" value (like the ones that tell you how much data can be stored in half a bit or whatever?).
There's a good explanation of the imaging equivalent of what I meant here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml [luminous-landscape.com]
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The "decibels" are relative to "full scale" i.e. maximum voltage. The actual power levels are linear. The "last bit" is a difference of 6dBFS with the "next bit".
I suspect that the sampling for imaging is rather different, and also as far as I know the human visual range is larger than can be captured with any one optical system. I am very wary of comparing the two unless
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But that's not what I want. I want the sound piped directly into my brain, bypassing my ears - my brain goes up to 20khz without a problem, my ears don't anymore. Convolution reverb would allow you to add any "room" or ambience afterwards, plus you wouldn't be distracted by anything while listening to music - the perfect monitoring system.
Dick Tracey (Score:1)
Imagine how this will help the medical community with diagnosis's. Send in the nanotube clowns and listen, watch, use sound to pound away at those nasty kidney and gall stones, etc.
Singing or speaking jackets? (Score:3, Funny)
As if ringtones weren't annoying enough. Welcome to hell.
Re:Singing or speaking jackets? (Score:5, Funny)
There goes a man with his own theme music.
And he's never gonna' give(!) it(!) up(!) (Score:2)
Imagine walking down the street being rick-rolled all the time. Or having to listen to 14-year-old girls' favorite boy band all the time. [the two may be identical]
On the other hand, imagine sneaking up on them from behind and tapping their shoulder while playing the imperial march and the hissing mask noise.
Or, better yet, the music from the murder scene from psycho.
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And I thought my coworker wore loud shirts now.
Waterproof, durable, flexible... (Score:3, Interesting)
To me it seems a natural fit to help "ruggedize" consumer electronics. One of the hardest things to seal on your phone is the speaker (and mic... which this probably wouldn't address in itself).
No more need for a speaker - just put the candybar up to your ear.
OT: Fixing /. displays? (Score:3, Interesting)
No matter what I try, certain articles are collapsed in the main-page view - including this one in Technology. Can someone tell me how to ensure that ALL articles are expanded?
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Yes. Click on Help&Preferences on the top tool bar. First go to Index/General and uncheck "Use Beta Index", if it is checked and click save. Then go to Index/Sections and select which sections you would like to see on the index - the far right option is to always display the full summary.
The beta index has some nice features like voting, but currently ignores your settings when deciding which stories to collapse.
Bicycles (Score:2)
Should be good for playing music on bicycles!
Stephan
Those crafty Chinese (Score:1)
"Chinese researchers have realised that a sheet of nanotubes behaves like a speaker when you send an audio current through it. ...
None of that boring old electrical current for them.
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Come on, this is Slashdot, man. The right question is, who doesn't?
Endless Applications (Score:1)